Don't Do This Either

If you are submitting to a journal that reviews articles anonymously, don't use the 1st person singular to refer to another article you wrote, listing the article in the Works Cited. Then I will know who you are and have to disqualify myself.

Show Me the Type

(Cross posted from RSL.)

Happy writers are all alike; unhappy writers are unhappy in their own way. This wasn't quite how I responded to a question at a Writing Process Reengineering seminar on Friday, but it was what I had tried to say. The question was based on the idea, apparently promoted by the writers of some writing manuals, that there are different writing temperaments, different types of writers (the artistic type, I presume, the scientific type, the engineering type, the military type?), and that they should approach the task differently. Didn't my program of "outlines" and "schedules" assume a particular kind of writer (a very orderly and "linear" one)? I was asked. Shouldn't other kinds of writers do things differently?

"There may be different kinds of unhappy writers," I said. "All happy writers do it this way." That is, there may be many different reasons that people are not productive (expressed with sentences that begin "I'm the type that..."), but there is only one reason that they are productive: they are working on a regular schedule, writing paragraphs that fill out an outline. I suppose what I was really saying, however, is that the academic writer is already a "type" and if that's what you want to be, and be it happily, then you will have to experience the joy of writing paragraphs that defend claims one at a time. That's the only way.

If you are the "type" of writer who needs inspiration to write, or the type of writer who needs to read more before you begin to write, or if you are the type of writer who can't write for a half hour or an hour at a time but needs several days to get started, or if you are the type of writer who can't write when you're also teaching, or if you're the kind of writer who worries about how "original" you are or does not not know (or want to know) who your readers are, or if you're the kind of writer who can only write under the pressure of an immediate deadline, well, then, you will be unhappy (as an academic writer) in exactly that way. But if you write every day, always to a thesis and for a readership of your peers, one paragraph at a time, then you will be the "typical" happy academic writer.

Unhappy writers have their own approaches to writing. Happy writers do it my way.

Create Ideal Conditions / Work in Real Conditions

Set up your work conditions to be ideal, in terms of space and time. Develop your scholarly base; have all your work materials that you need on hand when you work. Sharpen your pencils.

***

But don't wait until everything is ideal to start working. Work anyway, because there will always be conditions that are less than ideal in some significant respect. For me, for example, I often don't have the book I need on hand. I could be more organized, but I am not. Somehow I out-publish people who are much better organized because I don't let things like that bother me and I don't make excuses for myself.

Work Diary November 19-25

I don't know quite what to do with this record of my work. I suspect my readers find it duller than my other posts, but part of the impulse behind SMT was to get my own project done.

Friday, Nov. 19: A solid 700 words. At least some of the writing was disciplined enough to stand, since I focused on only a few segments of the article.

Sat. Nov. 20. 300 words + a planning session of a few hours.

Sun. Nov. 21. Nothing.

Mon. Nov. 22. Nothing.

Tuesday. Nov. 23. Nothing

Wed. Nov. 24. 500 words.

Thursday, Nov. 25. 400 words.

SUMMARY: With four solid days of works, including an excellent Friday, a good to excellent result. I don't like those three blank days in the middle though.

I also need a system to keep track of months. Maybe I should do months instead of weeks...

Clichés and the "Idiom Principle"

One of Orwell's sillier pieces of writing advice is ""Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Orwell advises "scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness." But then wouldn't he have to also scrap the metaphorical use of the verb "scrap" and the cliché phrase "has outworn its usefulness"? My point is not that Orwell is a hypocrite, that he himself breaks his own rules: that would be all too easy. Rather, the advice is simply incoherent and impossible to follow. Words tend to fall into statistical probable clusters, and part of being a language-user is to fall into some of those patterns along with everyone else. We scream in agony, or are "abundantly clear." We don't just have a vocabulary of words, but a vocabulary of idiomatic expressions. As a teacher of a foreign language, I am constantly correcting unidiomatic Spanish, things that would make no sense at all to a native speaker of Spanish. What Orwell calls dead metaphors are just idiomatic phrases. We call them clichés because of old printer's jargon. You could keep the moveable type for a particular phrase together in one place so you didn't have to reset it every time. Another word for this was a stereotype. Knowing clichés or idiomatic expressions and using them correctly is part of being competent in a language.

I'm not saying that you should reach for the cliché as your first resort, or that you should never try to reduce your unthinking usage of them. I try not to use the phrase "makes a valuable contribution to the field" in a book review, for example, because that is THE cliché phrase in that genre. But generally speaking, clichés are simply the way things happen to be said in a particular language.

In linguistics this is known as "chunking." Ben Zimmer of Language Log and The New York Times explains it like this:

The insights that are being put into practice have to do with "chunking" — the way that we learn and process language in prefabricated strings of words, or "lexical chunks." Native speakers of a language like English take for granted how much we rely on these chunks, and we tend not to appreciate their significance in the creation of linguistic fluency. But acquiring competency in a language isn't all about mastering rules of grammar and finding words to fill the functional slots, despite the syntactic emphasis in formal linguistics that has been championed by Noam Chomsky and his followers. A counter-current in linguistics since the 1960s has focused on what the late British scholar John Sinclair called "the idiom principle," or the tendency of certain words to cluster together with certain other words in their vicinity.

So we know in English someone can outwear her welcome, or something can outwear its usefulness. This verb has certain acceptable metaphorical uses. *"I've outworn that movie" doesn't really cut it.

I'm thinking of teaching my next advanced language course (a language course, but at the highest level for undergraduate Spanish majors) on idioms and proverbs. In my view, idioms are like truncated proverbs, or else proverbs are idiomatic phrases that take the form of entire sentences. The main weakness in the Spanish of very advanced learners is precisely this sense of the idiomatic principle. They can translate word by word and even make it grammatically correct, but they are translating chunks of English rather than adopting new idiomatic patterns. I'll let you know how it works out.

Sponge

We've all had the graduate student who is a sponge. The last thing he or she has read has to go into the dissertation, relevance aside. It's hard with this kind of spongy student because the attention tends to wander a bit. The absorptive impulse isn't bad in and of itself, but sometimes it becomes too associational (this reminds me of that) and lacks depth.

I'm a little like that too. When I'm working on a project, everything else I read just happens to bear a relation to it. Now, I happen to be teaching a novel by Unamuno and working on a section of an article where Unamuno comes up. Naturally, I turn to that novel and to another by Atxaga I just happened to have taught just now in my other course. Maybe I assigned these novels subconsciously knowing I would need them?

"Aim Small, Miss Small"

Here's my personal take on the aphorism "aim small, miss small," which Thomas develops in this post, the "best seller" of Stupid Motivational Tricks, the post most often viewed by visitors to the blog. It took me a while to get the meaning of this and translate it into terms that made sense to me.

Even if you aim to be as precise as possible, as close to your target, you will still make mistakes and misreadings. Nevertheless, you won't miss by a mile: your errors are likely to be small and relatively insignificant ones. This applies to various aspects of scholarly writing: prose style, argumentation, citation practices. The purpose of being somewhat pedantic about seemingly small issues is to avoid bigger mistakes.

That is the negative case for "aim small, miss small," emphasizing hedges against error. I wonder if there is also a positive case to be made. After all, the purpose of scholarship is not to avoid mistakes, but to make an affirmative contribution. Here I would argue that precision produces insight. I'm going to have to develop the case for this in another post, though.